These 11 Marble Sculptures of Iconic Artists Once Decorated One of America’s First Art Museums. What Happened to Them?

The Corcoran Gallery of Art was adorned with the statues, commissioned in the late 1800s. But since then, they’ve changed hands many times and finally found their way back to each other in a botanical garden

Samantha Baskind - Museums Correspondent

May 29, 2025

Get our newsletter!

Get our newsletter!

In the late 1870s, banker and art collector William Corcoran commissioned larger-than-life Carrara marble sculptures of some of the world’s best-known artists to decorate the second-story niches of his recently inaugurated art gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Critics of the day praised the Corcoran Gallery of Art as “Louvre-like” and an “edifice destined to be sung by all the muses of history as the first gallery built and endowed and dedicated to a community by an American.”

The landmark building that once housed Corcoran’s collection was designed by architect James Renwick Jr. in a turreted French Empire style. Today, the building is known as the Renwick Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the nation’s foremost space dedicated to exhibiting craft. But the sculptures no longer adorn its exterior. Instead, they mingle with flora and fauna at the Norfolk Botanical Garden in Virginia.

The seven-foot-tall statues had a highly important function: They would ornament the first building established in the United States with the express purpose to serve as an art museum. Artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, an American expatriate in Rome, was handpicked in the late 1870s by Corcoran to sculpt this prestigious commission. The Richmond, Virginia-born Ezekiel had recently carved a 24-foot monument to religious liberty for the Centennial International Exhibition, the world’s fair in Philadelphia celebrating the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A former Confederate soldier and the first ever Jewish cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, Ezekiel eventually sculpted monuments that depicted figures from both the Confederacy and the Union.

So eager to take on the commission, for its importance and to further his career, Ezekiel wrote in a letter to Corcoran: “It would be my especial pride to produce artistically good work without reference to the price, such as would most fitly add to the character of the ‘Corcoran Gallery of Art.’”

From around 1879 to 1884, Ezekiel carved the statues, each depicting those whom he and Corcoran officials deemed the world’s 11 greatest artists: Phidias, Raphael, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Antonio Canova and Thomas Crawford.

Ezekiel’s classically rendered sculptures idealize each master artist, and several are based on the artists’ self-portraits. Raphael resembles his quarter-length Self-Portrait in Italy’s Uffizi Galleries. Ezekiel adopted Raphael’s three-quarter view of his face and askew cap, with the Renaissance painter’s flowing cloak derived from his imagination. Ezekiel’s Titian closely coincides with the Italian master’s Self-Portrait, painted around 1550-1555. Like the self-portrait, Ezekiel’s sculpture portrays Titian with his head cocked toward his right shoulder, a lapel tucked underneath his coat, chains hanging around his neck, and his long beard and skullcap. “Living in Rome and steeped in the materials of classical sculpture as well as Renaissance painting, Ezekiel hoped to inscribe his own works into the art historical canon,” says Larry Silver, an emeritus art historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ezekiel clearly appreciated his sculptures: In his studio, crowded with plaster casts of past conceptions, he kept a few he especially prized. Two preserved casts were the Corcoran models of Leonardo and Titian, seen for years by visitors to his popular atelier. This was despite Ezekiel’s promise to Corcoran personnel that he would destroy all casts made for the gallery’s niches. Ezekiel was so enamored with Leonardo da Vinci’s artistry that he had a smock and cap designed after those worn by the Italian master. (A photograph of Ezekiel wearing this costume was part of a treasure trove of images chronicling the sculptor’s working process, discovered in the 1960s by the Italian field representative of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.)

And while Corcoran didn’t make a public statement about his thoughts on the statues, there is some evidence that perhaps he appreciated them as Ezekiel did: Initially, Corcoran had commissioned four of the sculptures. He apparently liked them enough to want more, and commissioned an additional seven after the first four were installed, bringing the total to 11.

But less than two decades after Ezekiel’s 1,500-pound artist statues were installed, they were ripped from their niches. After Corcoran died in 1888, the Corcoran Board of Trustees had a second, larger replacement gallery built in 1897 to house his collection and art school. The sculptures were left behind on the Renwick building. When the U.S. Court of Claims took over that building in 1899, most of the exterior niches were turned into windows, and thus the sculptures had to go. The Washington Post morbidly reported that during their removal the statues were “suspended by their necks from an improvised gallows,” which “strongly resembled a lynching,” before they were deposited in the back courtyard of the new Corcoran building and hidden from the public eye.

From an art history perspective, Ezekiel’s neoclassical artist sculptures were somewhat ill-conceived for their day. By the end of the 19th century, avant-garde sculpture was in vogue, epitomized by artist Auguste Rodin and his roughly rendered bronzes charged with emotional intensity. Ezekiel emphatically disagreed with the trend. “Rodin did some good work in earlier times, but his fragments and sketchy works today show only that he caters to a false taste in art,” he said in his posthumously published memoir.

Fifteen years after the creation of the new Corcoran Gallery, one critic looked back at the original building’s decoration: Corcoran’s “choice fell naturally upon Ezekiel, who had so notable a record of accomplishment, though the selection was more creditable to his zealous intentions than to his artistic judgment, as results amply proved.”

After the sculptures were dismissed by the gallery, Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean, who owned the 45-carat Hope Diamond, bought them to decorate the land around her swimming pool. When McLean’s possessions were auctioned in 1948 to pay inheritance taxes, an article in Life magazine covered the event. One photograph shows potential buyers walking past the pool with two of Ezekiel’s statues visible in the background.

Eventually, all 11 statues were purchased by businessman Elam L. Tanner Jr. at the McLean auction and brought to his property in Richmond, Virginia. When Tanner moved a few years later, an antique dealer took possession. The statues were bought by two other Virginians: seven by artist Bruce Dunstan and four by Vincent Speranza, who was interested in art.

Dunstan bequeathed Crawford to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1952, where it briefly stood on a second-story terrace. The terrace was closed to the public in 1954, and Crawford again disappeared from public view. In 1960, the sculpture was brought out of isolation and placed conspicuously outside the museum. The Richmond News Leader took notice and covered Crawford’s re-emergence with the headline “Recluse Now Greeter.”

Then the Norfolk Botanical Garden in southeastern Virginia began slowly acquiring the statues. Dunstan and Speranza donated them over a period of 12 years, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has permanently lent Crawford to the garden. “I can think of no other better venue for Ezekiel’s Thomas Crawford,” says Leo Mazow, curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “Separating one sculpture from a series of 11 would be unfortunate.”

After nearly a century, by the mid-1970s, the once-nomadic artist sculptures were finally reunited. Though in the past, they seemed to be an afterthought, they now enjoy life anew. Around a half-million annual visitors to the Norfolk Botanical Garden see the Corcoran Gallery marbles standing in a designated Moses Jacob Ezekiel Statuary Vista Garden.

“The Ezekiel sculptures are tremendously popular among our diverse group of both national and international visitors,” says Peter Schmidt, president and CEO of the Norfolk Botanical Garden. “This collection perfectly blends art and nature, offering an inspiring space for contemplation and providing a serene escape for those seeking inspiration or simply a peaceful retreat.” The garden’s 400-foot-long grassy, wooded expanse creates a dramatic effect and includes signage about the statues’ donors and information about Ezekiel’s life.

The Smithsonian took possession of Corcoran’s landmark structure in 1965. Later, during an extensive renovation, officials recognized the worth of ornamenting the building and thus the value of Ezekiel’s statues. Administrators approached the Norfolk Botanical Garden about returning the statues for its exterior restoration. They were rebuffed. The garden instead gave permission for Italian sculptor Renato Lucchetti to create replicas of Peter Paul Rubens and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Lucchetti made plaster molds and cast them with a durable marble mix, to which he added a patina to create an aged effect. “Ezekiel’s masters,” now in reproduction, rise high on the red sandstone bases of the Renwick Gallery’s 17th Street side, tucked into the only niches not converted into windows. Rubens and Murillo welcome museum visitors as they round the building to the front entrance.

Yet another institution also desired the sculptures. In 1985, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk requested five of Ezekiel’s statues for its building’s niches. Again, the Norfolk Botanical Garden declined, arguing that separating the works would be unfavorable, and that depleting one cultural institution for another in the same city didn’t make sense. Robert O. Matthews, then the superintendent of the garden, touted the statues’ importance in a letter refusing this proposal. “The Moses Ezekiel statues are the major attraction of our Renaissance Gardens and one of the highlights of our tour,” he wrote. “It has become nationally and internationally known that this collection has been reassembled and can be found on display at the gardens.” The Chrysler Museum of Art rejected a suggestion from the garden to make copies for its niches, and the Botanical Garden rejected the Chrysler’s offer to pay for reproductions on its grounds.

Though the original statues are gone from the Renwick Gallery, its exterior tympanum features one distinctive relic of the building’s past: a round medallion with a bronze relief profile portrait of William Corcoran. The medallion, classical in inspiration and recalling Roman imperial portraiture, was made by Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

Samantha Baskind | Read More

Samantha Baskind is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University. She is the author of six books, including Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor, coming out in September.